THE TELEPHEMERA YEARS: 1971 – PART 3

Written By:

Alan Boon

Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. They hit the schedules alongside established shows, hoping for a long run, but it’s not always to be, and for every Knight Rider there’s two Street Hawks. But here at STARBURST we celebrate their existence and mourn their departure, drilling down into the new season’s entertainment with equal opportunities square eyes… these are The Telephemera Years!

1971-72

Just as America was dragging itself out of the long Sixties and into their funky successor years, US TV was undergoing a season change in 1971, with the last of the great western TV shows reaching the end of their runs. Audiences could still thrill to Alias Smith and Jones, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza, but the cop show ruled the roost, with The Mod Squad, Hawaii Five-O, and Ironside joined at the top of the ratings by new arrivals Cannon and McMillan & Wife.

A dry period for genre fans saw interest lay mostly with Mission: Impossible and Night Gallery, although Bewitched could be relied upon for some supernatural nose-twitching fun, but the big new hits were The New Dick Van Dyke Show and transatlantic transplant Sanford and Son. But what of those shows that didn’t even get past the pilot stage? This is the story of four of 1971’s unsold shows…

Inside OUT (NBC): In this TV pilot developed by Lawrence J Cohen and Fred Freeman, The Office of Unusual Tactics – or OUT, get it? – is a US government agency tasked with dealing with problems caused by inept officials in other government departments. Headed up by Bill Daily’s Ron Hart, the debut outing saw them attempt to recover counterfeit money accidentally sent to a bank by the Secret Service.

Inside OUT was one of three pilots stitched together and shown as Triple Play on NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies on March 22^nd 1971, the others being Cohen’s own The Good Life and small-town medical comedy Is There a Doctor in the House. Introduced by Rowan and Martin, it was hoped that all three would make it to series but only The Good Life was picked up by NBC (and even that lasted only half a season).

The pilot featured a young Farrah Fawcett as a member of Daily’s team, and the comedy relied on Three Stooges-like set-ups, with obvious disguises and telegraphed pratfalls the order of the day, and it’s still a very funny watch on YouTube, where it has been preserved for posterity.

Fawcett, of course, would soon find fame as one of Charlie’s Angels, and Daily would become a regular on The Bob Newhart Show, for which he is probably best known (alongside his turn as Major Healey in I Dream of Jeanie). Director Reza Badiyi would continue to direct a plethora of TV shows over the years but would become particularly in demand as a “title visualiser,” responsible for the opening credits of such joys as Hawaii Five-O, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Holmes and Yoyo.

Earth II (ABC): Earth II creators Allan Balter and William Read Woodfield were veterans of Irwin Allen’s technicolour schlock and had latterly worked on Mission: Impossible together; in 1971 they came up with this gripping yarn of an orbiting colony of Americans under threat from the attentions of Communist China.

2001: A Space Odyssey’s Gary Lockwood starred as the colony commander, faced with a decision of whether to intercept a Chinese satellite on a collision course, made more complicated by politics down on Earth, where Earth II is a member of the United Nations and is frantically scrambling to end the crisis through diplomacy.

Balter and Woodfield fill the cast with an interesting variety of characters, including a pair of Soviet defectors, and Lalo Schifrin provided a score every bit as tense as the action on board. The pilot was shown as a TV movie on November 28^th 1971, with the intention that it launch a series but the cost and complexity of the production prohibited any further adventures for the crew of Earth II.

The pilot was released theatrically outside of the US and performed reasonably well, despite being caught in the budgetary gap between TV and Hollywood, but Balter and Woodfield returned to jobbing scriptwriting, at least until the former was given the chance to develop another show, which turned out to be 1983’s The Powers of Matthew Star…

Charlie Chan (NBC): Poor old Charlie Chan… Created by novelist Earl Derr Biggers in 1919 as a response to the proliferation of “Yellow Peril” Chinese stereotypes in popular literature, the amiable detective has become a byword for racially-insensitive casting, undoing all of Biggers’s work – his Chan is capable, independent, and frequently gets the better of white criminals – with a parade of Caucasian men pretending to be Asian.

By 1971 it had been fourteen years since Chan was last on television (and a further eight years since the final movie outing) and, given several other classic detectives had been revived in recent years, it was felt the time was right for another tilt at the Hawaiian sleuth. Once again, a white man was cast as Chan as Ross Martin (a Polish Jew for good measure!) stepped into the role, investigating the death of a wealthy Greek tycoon aboard his luxury yacht.

The usual formula for such productions was that they be shown as part of the networks’ various movie showcases and, if critical and audience reception was positive, be greenlit for a full series the following Fall. Not only did this latest edition of Charlie Chan not get picked up for a full treatment, even the pilot sat unloved for two years, until it was finally shown as The Return of Charlie Chan on July 17^th 1973, as part of NBC’s Tuesday Night at the Movies strand.

A year before, and possibly inspired by the pilot, CBS added The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan to its Saturday morning line-up, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon that cast Keye Luke (who had played “number one son” Lee Chan in the golden age movies) as the detective, the first Chinese-American actor to portray the character.

Escape (ABC): With a high concept premise every bit as home in the 1970s sci-fi boom as Westworld or The Andromeda Strain, Escape saw Christopher George’s former escapologist turned private detective trying to stop a scientist before he can create the first artificially made living organism, a race against time that tests George’s skills from both his former and new careers.

Character actor John Vernon – probably best known as the mayor in Dirty Harry – hams it up as maniacal scientist Charles Wending, who has kidnapped his brother and niece to force them to work on his crazy scheme which, if seen to its conclusion, threatens the existence of all life on Earth!

The pilot aired as a TV movie on April 6^th 1971 and presumably a full series would have shoehorned in any number of situations where being a former escape artist (actually, can you be a former escape artist?) would be crucial to solving a crime. We’ll never know because ABC declined to send Escape to series and viewers were robbed of such a development but you can watch the pilot on YouTube.

Given his experience in the field, writer Paul Playdon was hired in 1974 to write for The Magician, starring Bill Bixby as a stage magician who moonlights as a detective, and would later develop CHiPs for television, shepherding Rick Rosner’s motorcycle cop show onto the air.

Next on The Telephemera Years: What were the kids were watching in 1971? Something funky!

Check out our other Telephemera articles:

The Telephemera Years: 1966 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1968 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1969 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1971 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1973 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1975 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1977 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1980 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1982 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Telephemera Years: 1984 (part 1, 2, 3, 4)